It has been a rough year for Asian airlines, following the two great scandals of missing planes for Malaysia Airlines earlier this year; now, the AirAsia missing flight destined for Singapore has also gone missing, and search parties across the world hope for a happy ending.
Following the two widely publicized Malaysia Airlines flights that went down in 2014 - the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March and the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in July -, news of the AirAsia missing flight have cast an even bigger shadow on traveling to the area.
According to The Toronto Star, news of the AirAsia missing flight broke out last Sunday, following reports that the 8501 flight, which was set to go from Surabaya to Singapore, had disappeared from the radar about 42 minutes after takeoff, prompting a state of emergency and search for the missing aircraft.
It seems the airline had its own ties to previous incidents of the year, as AirAsia, a small low-cost airline operating within the region, is an airline actually based on Malaysia.
According to The Huffington Post, search for the AirAsia missing flight had halted on Sunday night due to darkness, after the first research showed no sign of wreckage around the region the aircraft first disappeared in the early hours of the day.
Satellite images have shown very stormy weather at the time of the flight, which in no doubt affected the performance of the aircraft and its ultimate disappearance from radars.
The jet, an Airbus A320-216, is thought to be "at the bottom of the sea," according to CNN.
"(Due to) the coordinate that was given to us and the evolution from the calculation point of the flight track is at sea, our early conjecture is that the plane is in the bottom of the sea," said Bambang Sulistyo, the leader of the national search and rescue agency of Indonesia, to different news outlets last Monday regarding the possible destiny of the AirAsia missing flight.
